The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (9 page)

I don’t fuss with Grandma about going to church. I say I’ll put on the yellow dress. “And the SHOES to MATCH,”
Grandma says, making her capitals. She found the dress at the Saint Vincent de Paul thrift store with a fifty-cent price tag and a new price tag too. It doesn’t fit so well around my old beige bra, but with a sweater over the top I think Grandma will like it fine. That’s her best way of liking things.

If you ask me I would say that mostly I don’t look like myself when I wear church finery. Or feel like a self that makes any sense. And today my scalp itches because Grandma made me go to the hairdresser to get me looking more respectable. “None of those people want to see a pickaninny in they church,” Grandma said. She is glad that my hair has grown out again. I can’t say that I don’t like the way my hair looks. It’s straight now—straight like Mor’s hair for the first time ever. And it’s long enough for me to move it off my shoulder with a swish. But the hairdresser let the relaxer set too long and burned a few spots on my scalp and burned my left ear with the blow-dryer’s hot metal tip. And I am still tender-headed.

Two weeks ago Monday was my first day as a straight-haired girl.

Wearing my hair down and straight is one reason that the girls who hang out in the bathroom want to beat me up. They say: You better watch out or I’ll snatch you bald-headed.

Is that a weave?

You think you so cute tossin that hair around.

The truth is I never toss it. I do like to pull it back like the Bionic Woman did on TV. Two fingers pulling straight back at the top of my head to show off my ears. And I am glad that
there are no tangles, no naps, and no kitchen at the back of my head anymore.

But people look at me differently. I don’t look just different or scary or undefinable: I look pretty. That pretty is what was Mor’s: my eyes, now my straight hair. People act different around me too. Mr. Barucci, my science teacher, said something real nice. He said I looked very beautiful, a pure masterpiece. I smiled a no-teeth smile and he said, “Makes those eyes more startling to look at.” And he put his fingers to his lips and made a kiss he threw in the air. “Bella!”

A
UNT
L
ORETTA AND
D
REW
have stopped by to say hi before they go to play tennis. Aunt Loretta moved into Drew’s apartment a few months ago. I wish she had taken me too. Aunt Loretta comes to visit at least twice a week, but every time she comes Grandma asks when the wedding is.

“I’m working on that lizard now,” she says to Grandma in a fake whisper, leaning over to kiss her good-bye on the cheek, and points at Drew.

“He a rooster,” Grandma says.

“A rooster?” Aunt Loretta laughs.

“That’s the kind of lizard that take care of you,” Grandma says and makes her teeth click.

Aunt Loretta’s hand is on the door, and I can see all the good that will be her day. I can’t wait to go where I want to go without people (Grandma) studying me. I want to walk out on a Sunday morning with my boyfriend next to me, with everybody seeing I have things to do. I start high school this year,
and I’m going to get all As and think about the long run. And when I’m seventeen I’m going to go to college and then see the world. I guess I’ll be someone like Aunt Loretta. Aunt Loretta is a black woman—the kind of woman I will be.

Aunt Loretta walks out the front door slowly, and I see her red red nails and her sparkly engagement ring. Grandma wasn’t right. There is paint beneath Aunt Loretta’s fingernails, and it doesn’t matter.

Aunt Loretta is backing out the door with her tennis bag over her arm and Drew is right behind her and that light is still in her, turned on. Grandma tut-tuts because the lizard hasn’t opened the door for her daughter. Aunt Loretta pauses at the threshold—she’s about to go on stage. “I’m sorry you can’t go with me today, sweet,” Aunt Loretta says like I am a candy. It is gentle the way she says it. I mean, the way she says it sounds like a warm lake breeze. And behind the words I hear: I’ll be by again real soon.

D
EACON
J
AMES ALWAYS
makes it a point to talk to Grandma at services. Deacon James is a man about Grandma’s age, with no hair. He is the only deacon in the AME Zion Church with no wife even though there are a lot of women without husbands. That makes him a popular man.

Sometimes he sits next to us during the service. Today Deacon James holds Grandma’s hand high in the air and makes her twirl around when he sees her.

“Miss Doris,” he says, which makes Grandma bat her eyes, “you sure are lookin fine for our services today.” Grandma crosses her left foot in front of her and puts her hand on her
hat, posing, so Deacon James can have a picture of her in his mind. “Deacon James,” she says, “I’m feeling good.”

“And how’s this precious young thing?”

Today I am precious and young, and last week I was sweet and shy. Deacon James cannot remember my name. Heather, Wendy, Holly he’s called me over the last few months since I started going to the AME Zion Church to make Grandma happy. Deacon James, like most of the folks Grandma’s age, comes from the South—North Carolina to be exact, just across the bridge from Wilsonville—and he has no history of Rachels. I am okay with precious and sweet.

Deacon James sits next to us during the service, and I know I must pay attention. It is like sitting next to the principal during a school assembly.

We stand. We sit. We sing. We sing and I only pretend sing. I can’t make those big sounds that Grandma can make, or the smooth high sounds the girl who looks like Tamika can make when she does her solos. We stand and sit. And all the time, if I keep my mouth going, no one notices that no sound is coming through my lips.

I think I see Deacon James touch Grandma’s knee during “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” During the next hymn he touches a little bit up her thigh. Grandma doesn’t seem to notice, or she doesn’t seem to mind, or she doesn’t want to be impolite.

The Gospel is usually loud and has a lot of soul to it. It makes you sway, clap, almost dance. I love these big sounds in the small church. Why didn’t I know about the Gospel before?

Mor used to be in a choir. It was a Danish choir and she
never learned how to do the Gospel like we do here at the AME Zion Church. The Gospel has style.

I
AM AT
church listening to the Gospel when never careful Aunt Loretta trips on her shoelace in a broken patch of Irving Park’s public court and lands on a piece of glass no one has seen, making it love-thirty. And she’s the one who’s down. She cuts her face. “Oh good Lord,” Grandma says, “she cut her face.”

“At least she didn’t poke out an eye,” I say, trying to calm Grandma. But the only picture in my mind is of Aunt Loretta, her beautiful smile with a jagged slice in it and two long sewing stitches holding the sides together. And her hands covering up her smile, so she won’t make Grandma mad looking at the now ugly ex–Rose Festival princess.

G
RANDMA WON’T LET
me go to the hospital. She says it is “too much.” A young girl doesn’t need to see such things. “And Loretta don’t need to be exercised so.” Oh, she has so many reasons. That evening I sit and pray. Not knowing how. I will lift her up.

I
SNEAK UP
to the hospital with Drew’s help. I haven’t seen Aunt Loretta in two months. Her face has a ragged scar, but that’s not what’s wrong, Grandma explains. They gave her medicine, and the medicine done made her sick. It’s burned the outside of her and the inside and made her bleed. Her skin has come off in giant patches and sheets. I think Grandma has misunderstood. She doesn’t understand the sophisticated
things too well. But I hear her talking to the nurses on the phone and every day to Drew in the kitchen, and he says, “Don’t be mad Mrs. Morse. They couldn’t know any better. Sometimes it just happens—an antibiotic can go wrong in somebody. They were trying to help.” I think of the crooked seam in Aunt Loretta’s face. I think: Will Drew still love Aunt Loretta?

Drew drives me to the hospital and tells me Aunt Loretta’s room number. “You know I can be late for work if you want me to go with you,” he says as I get out of the car. “I can do it by myself. I’m used to hospitals,” I say and wave good-bye.

Aunt Loretta is in the same hospital I went to when I first came. The nurse tells me to put on gloves, a gown, and a mask. But first wash my hands. There is a small mirror above the sink. I want to look pleasing and I practice my smile. And the way I will say “I love you” without staring at the way her face is stitched together with thread. I wash my hands and put on the gloves and gown.

“And the mask, honey. Don’t forget,” the nurse says.

The hospital smells stop at the door. Then it is all pink and soap and toothpaste. I can smell through the mask: It’s Aunt Loretta.

But maybe I am just making this up. This room has a bare tile floor and machines on rolling poles. There are tubes that run from the machines to under Aunt Loretta’s bed sheet. And there is a tube in her mouth that keeps away her smile.

I am happy that Aunt Loretta is asleep so she does not see me cry. I am happy that I am wearing this mask because my well-rehearsed smile is gone. And I can’t make up the pink and
the smell of soap and toothpaste anymore. The thread holding her face together has sticky brown blood on it. Her face is swollen and so are her tiny arms. The room is filled with beeps and the machine’s sound for breathing.

“You okay, honey?” the nurse asks when she comes in and writes down the numbers from the machine above Aunt Loretta’s bed.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Just have to give her all the love you have. That’s what’ll get her better. Her temperature’s coming down. See that number there,” and she points to the machine with three lines, “that’s a good sign.”

We are looking for signs because Aunt Loretta can’t talk and medicine can’t help her. It is the medicine that made her sick.

The nurse goes away carrying a tube of something that looks like blood from the table by Aunt Loretta’s bed. Where Aunt Loretta’s skin is coming off are giant white patches where she used to be brown. I make the whiteness beautiful. Not hot and raw. Like it looks now. Like giant burns. Now she will be the color of the porcelain figures in Grandma’s cupboard, special. She will have the perfect color for jewels and long gloves and worship.

There is a way that people die. They get sick or they go away. It’s not like shutting a door, or opening one, like Aunt Loretta did that last Sunday morning I saw her with her light on.

Laronne

As Laronne opened the apartment door, stale heat escaped and dried out her eyes. The apartment’s only light came from the two living room windows. The electricity had been shut off.

It would be easy to box up what was left in the apartment. Most of their clothes were in opened suitcases, which lined the far wall along with dozens of cardboard moving boxes.

Laronne stripped the sheets from the couch. It was where Nella must have slept, like a guest in her own home.

Laronne packed up the bedding from the bassinet, the towels, the silverware, the handful of pots above the stove, and the dishes that didn’t have chips.

In the bathroom medicine cabinet, she found on the top shelf shaving cream and beneath it a rusty ring, a drugstore aftershave, and Mitchum cologne. She threw the boyfriend’s
things away. She cleared the other shelves with a swipe of her hand, not registering who belonged to a certain toothbrush or which one’s brush this might be. Laronne scrubbed the bathtub, the toilet, and the mirror with silver flakes on the edges. She wiped the cabinets, the rusty ring from the top shelf. She cleaned the floor. She cleaned each room this way. She cleaned as if it were her religion. When she was done, she was a white clean scent.

It was in the front closet where Laronne found a tote bag stuffed with papers and two hardbound journals, both filled with Nella’s handwriting. Nella had scribbled addresses, grocery lists, math problems and proofs, doodles and to-do lists diagonally and haphazardly and without any logic Laronne could discern. Laronne wondered whether it was all written in English, some of the handwriting was so difficult to read.

In an entry dated two weeks before the accident, Laronne read: “He was drinking with his friend when he knows alcohol’s not allowed in the house. He didn’t know I had come home.”

A whole section of doodling followed that, and there was a coffee ring on the left-hand side of the page. Maybe Nella had walked away from the journal. Fed the baby. Gone to bed. Not all the pages were dated. Some entries looked as if Nella had gone back to fill in new thoughts on her first impressions like she was grading herself. In blue or red ink in the margins, she had written: “wrong,” “lied,” “stupid,” or “naive.”

And though Laronne wasn’t sure that it was the last entry Nella had made, on the last page of one journal she read: “They’re mine. If people can’t see it, how can I keep them safe?”

The spines of the two journals were marked 31 and 32. She searched through the boxes to see whether she could find more. She found numbers 10 through 15 in one box, 21 and 22 in another. She found, in all, twenty-nine journals scattered throughout a dozen boxes. Laronne stacked the journals in order. Then she read from the first page of the oldest journal dated two years ago: “This is Day 1. My first day with no drink. I hope I can keep counting to forever.”

A
S
L
ARONNE LEFT
Nella’s apartment, she heard music. It sounded like a child practicing either in the apartment above or below. She closed the apartment door and saw a boy, the boy who had held vigil at the shrine. He was seated on the stairs one flight up. In his hands he held a harmonica.

“What’s that you got there?” she asked.

The boy held the harmonica in the air to show her.

“That’s pretty neat.”

He shrugged.

“What are you playing?”

“Nothing,” he said.

The boy walked down five stairs to the landing where Laronne stood. He was eye level to her middle.